Sunday, January 1, 2017

The Paradox of Moral Obligations

What is a person, fundamentally speaking? A person is a
creative void facilitating a fractal tripling of natural forms in the
symbolic and technological realms. The void in each person is functional, not
physical: while we aren’t absolutely empty, we’re defined by our fictions, such
as by folk conventions about our identity as supposedly unified, immaterial
selves or spirits. In evolutionary terms, animal brains became more
sophisticated over a long period until the cerebral cortex developed, becoming
a brain within a brain that initiates a spiral of abstraction in mental space. The higher, primate brain is biologically
discontinuous from the environment, by way of its isolation within the skull, but
the cerebral cortex has autonomous and global, holistic access to the rest of
the brain, providing the person the power to veto his or her emotional impulses
or instinctive reactions, and to imagine strategic models of the environment.
These models are pragmatic idealizations and thus, strictly speaking, fictive;
in science, they’re called “ceteris
paribus,” meaning that their generalizations pertain to the counterfactual
scenario in which certain factors falling outside the model’s purview don’t
interfere with the modeled regularity. That is, the model is about only a small
part of the world that’s isolated by the imagination, even though in reality
that modeled part is entangled with the whole of nature. Despite our having a
substantive neurological identity, then, we’re effectively hollow as persons in
that as we model ourselves as well, we retreat to evermore rarified
reifications, including daydreams and theological speculations. While we seem to ourselves to be the
universe’s starring attractions, we’re vacuous in our existential homelessnessand chameleonic
flexibility We can survive virtually anywhere because we’re so lacking in a
fixed identity and are so detached from nature that we’ve devised an objective
stance towards the outer world, which has empowered us with technological
applications of our models that have reshaped the environment to our benefit.

Whereas an animal is like a robot in lacking much hidden,
mental depth, a person’s mind is master of the symbolic niche. That mind and
niche are physically nowhere, as such, and so we’re the proverbial ghosts in
the machine. We’re cognitively detached from stimuli and from our animal side,
and so we’re liable to feel alienated and forlorn, oppressed by our
understanding that the world that’s given rise to such freaks as us must be godless
and out-of-whack. We boast of our spiritual depths, making esoteric religious
pronouncements such as that the ultimate material (Brahman) and Self (Atman)
are one, that matter and mind are aspects of the same thing, that our personal
identities are masks worn by ultimate reality and that each of us, therefore,
is fully God. And we war over the contradictions between our religious
fictions, not willing to face the truth that was put best and most recently by
the so-called existential philosophers and psychologists. At most, matter and
mind are one in that what we usually think of as mind is entirely imaginary,
and so the former cancels out the latter; the fictitious mind isn’t nothing at
all, mind you, but it’s an embarrassing lie, an instrument used by greater
forces to marshal our skills for the next round of mass extinctions and evolutionary
transcendence. And at best we’re divine in that we’re godlike tools for
transducing natural stimuli into symbolic representations and for imposing the products
of those idealizations onto nature in the forms of our artifacts. Far from
making us worthy of being revered, our divinity is likewise an indignity: our
omniscience and omnipotence depend on our ability to form Voltron-like
megamachines, that is, social collectives or mass minds which are
inevitably oppressive in their hierarchical composition. Thus, our personal
capacity for enlightenment is typically shortchanged, as a minority takes
command and sets about oppressing and infantilizing the masses; the rulers become especially godlike, corrupting themselves in the process, while the
bovine herd idles, numbing itself with bestial diversions.

The Moral Conundrum for the Enlightened Few

If this is our existential reality or if some such account
is, at least, the most compelling philosophical story about the meaning of our
species, we face an ethical conundrum. The
enlightened person must be poised between feeling compassion and disgust for us
all. On the one hand, we have every
reason to pity ourselves and others, since we’re all trapped as playthings of
monstrous (unguided but creative) natural forces and elements, and our vaunted
spirituality is ironically a form of profound emptiness (fictitiousness). There
is no substantial unifying self, but only a mammalian brain that dreams it’s a
god, which fiction ironically brings divinity into functional being, as
evidenced by the results of our artistic imagination, scientific
objectification, and technological industry. So we’re each more or less deluded
and lost. Shouldn’t we therefore help each other find ourselves? Wouldn’t
nobility consist in the humility needed to recognize that since we’re all
victims of the same existential grievances, we all need help, and vanity must
be due just to a crass sort of narrow-mindedness? The ethical task would seem obvious: to elevate each other however we
can, not putting ourselves before others, but recognizing the universality of
our struggles.

And yet precisely because of the absurdity of our hollowness
and of the entire sham of human history in which shameful delusions and
neuroses have been so decisive, an enlightened person should lack the
motivation to aid anyone, including herself. On the contrary, her empathy
should be impeded by her disgust with the horrific implications of our
existential condition. She may pity the fellow traveller who needs help, but
she could just as easily take pleasure in watching that person suffer as she
muses that the other is being inadvertently punished for that person’s
inevitable faults. We deserve help
not because we’re finite and fallible, but because we’re perverse; we abuse ourselves and flee from fulfilling our
potential, and that willfulness makes us worthy of moral support. By contrast,
animals may on occasion be pitifully weak or wrongheaded, but because they’re
incapable of evil, helping an animal can be an act of charity but not a moral
intervention. The ethical imperative begins with the sense that we should cheer
for the underdog and should feel revolted when the weaker individual is
bullied, as well as exalted when the weaker one triumphs against all odds. But
a fully moral act also converts evil into some good. The underdog mustn’t be just physically inferior; instead, that
weakness should be the source of the underdog’s squalor, and the weaker one’s
degradations must stand out as signs of the grotesque impersonality at the root
of all things.Otherwise, the
underdog could merely use assistance
(like any animal), but there would be no moral demand to offer any, because there would be no cosmic crime to be
avenged, no grand absurdity to whitewash with an ultimately futile exercise of
virtue. The spilt blood that cries out for vengeance must appall as a sign
that the universe is a headless behemoth; otherwise, the sight of that blood
would compel us merely to clean it up on instrumental grounds. But just because indignities are so
appalling when understood by an enlightened person in their existential
context, they provoke horror and disgust as easily as they do empathy and
compassion.

Is it true, though, that compassion has moral status only when
shown towards a faulty individual who’s in need of assistance? Suppose you
encounter a wholly innocent person who’s made wrongly to suffer. Notice that
this isn’t as easy to imagine as you might think. Take the biblical character
of Job, for example. Job is supposed to be a righteous man who’s done nothing
to earn the pains that God inflicts on him due to his wager with the angel
Satan. But if Job’s righteousness depends on his faith in God, Job loses his
status as a guilt-free individual since Job would thereby have to be gullible,
ignorant, and likely tribal in his thinking. If Job loves his particular god, he
would likely condemn outsiders and even kill them should they desecrate the
holy sites of Job’s religion. The fact is that it’s not easy to imagine a perfectly
innocent mortal. Even an infant or a child is nauseatingly self-obsessed.
Still, a child is comparatively innocent, so suppose you encounter a child in
peril and empathy compels you to save the child. What would make this action
morally admirable? I contend that the moral status is due to the act’s heroism:
saving the child undoes an outrage, but this outrage consists in the world’s
exploitation of the child’s weakness.
Innocence, in this case, is itself a kind
of fault or deficit: the child can’t fend for itself, is easily
overpowered, and is thus liable to suffer unless the child is protected by an
adult.

So once again, empathy for a child’s plight counts as
morally praiseworthy because the heroic act is in response to an offense
against our sense of dignity. First there’s nature’s mindlessness which wreaks
all manner of absurd havoc, but there’s also our helplessness—in the case of
relatively innocent individuals such as children—or our set of vices which keeps
us from fulfilling our potential, including Job’s vice of likely being too
religious. The point is it’s not the unfairness
of some suffering that makes its elimination a moral obligation. The unfairness
is never absolute, because none of us is perfectly innocent; we’re tarnished
just by being natural animals. Perfect innocence, that is, an admirable rather
than a disappointing or revolting character entails not just a record of
selflessness, but omnipotence so that nature at large could never get the
better of such an individual. The purely
innocent person, then, would be a god, which is another way of saying that
mortality is indeed a sort of original sin. We feel obligated to aid those
who don’t deserve the suffering they receive, because the whole sordid
situation is an affront to good taste; both the more guilty party, namely
nature’s monstrousness or the aggressor’s vice, as well as the victim’s
helplessness or error in judgment that contributes to the victim’s predicament
are despicable and call out to be rectified. Morality is an act of creative destruction: we erase the offense,
if only to preserve our sense of dignity and to be able to live with ourselves,
and we replace the offense with a less outrageous state of affairs.

Resolving the Paradox

Notice how Pauline Christian morality handles the conflict between the need to be
disgusted by the world and the moral calling of compassion to help others. On
the one hand, we’re revolting in God’s eyes, because of original sin, which is
our “fallenness,” our tendency to be corrupted. On the other, we receive mercy rather
than destruction by God’s “grace,” as a gratuitous, undeserving gift of God’s
sacrifice. Thus, God’s hatred of sin is appeased by the torture of the messiah,
while his pity for us, owing to our deplorable condition, manifests in that
same displacement of his wrath. God accepts the penalty for our wickedness, while
we receive the blessings; Jesus didn’t deserve that punishment and we don’t
deserve salvation from hell, but we all receive those judgments nonetheless, and the absurdity of Jesus’s punishment must
be meant to cancel out that of our gift of salvation. The conflict between
the interests in justice and in forgiveness—which originates in the fact that
morally-charged compassion is shown only to the unworthy, not to the
innocent—isn’t resolved in Christianity but is only concealed by a Jesuitical
shell game.

Secular, so-called rational morality doesn’t fare better,
since reason and objectified facts are blind to all values, including both the
moral imperative to strive for a highest good, and the aesthetic sense that our
existential condition is appalling. Thus, reason-based morality doesn’t get off
the ground and likewise disguises its deficit with scientistic rhetoric that compels consent by reminding us how admirable are the other fruits
of reason. Morality is supposed to be
just one more technical problem to solve by a feat of social engineering.
We want pleasure rather than pain, and so, in theory, perfected know-how can
make us happy under all circumstances. This may be true as far as it goes, but
it’s not morality. We may actually want pleasure, but that doesn’t mean we ought to have that preference; on the
contrary, we may deserve to suffer regardless of our genetically-programmed
inclinations. Also, notice that a world in which everyone is physically happy
is consistent with that world being dystopian, as in 1984 or Brave New World.

What, then, tips the scales so that either disgust or
compassion should win out? Can the conflict be resolved? The real mystery is
why pity and empathy should have become central to morality. The psychologically
prior reaction is the negative one of being revolted by our torments. Of
course, empathy has an evolutionary origin, but its cause in being part of some
lasting fitness won’t suffice for any moral worth. Our species is fundamentally
appalling, and that sense is reinforced as we learn more about ourselves and
our history. The sadist who exploits someone’s weakness isn’t evil, then, in
spurning the option to pity that victim instead. Sadism is neither moral nor immoral, but is aesthetically grounded
in distaste for cowardice, duplicity, or other such common faults; the sadist punishes
others for their imperfections. But the
moral impulse somehow transcends this natural urge to loath that which can
rightly be loathed. Instead of merely feeling contempt for us all, based on
knowledge of our myriad wrongdoings, a certain type of person will suffer from
a different reaction; she’ll feel a pang of worry on other people’s behalf,
identifying herself with others and choosing to put them before her even to the
point of risking her life in coming to their aid.

Empathy is likely premised on a utopian dream that our deplorable
condition will be overcome once and for all, that our suffering is fated to end
(in the afterlife or at the end of time) or at least that historical progress
is possible if we learn to envision our equality in suffering. This hope
derives from the Zoroastrian myth that elaborated on the primary
fiction of a substantive, unified self. That self is immaterial and thus
vacuous, as is the utopian future in which absolute good conquers evil. Again,
these fictions take on a life of their own, as it were, becoming socially
operative as noble lies that motivate us to act as though the lies were
profound revelations. We help others because we believe compassion is for the
greater good, and we do improve each other’s lives in the process, but once
again progress as an increase in happiness isn’t yet morally relevant. Without suffering, there would be no
morality since morality makes sense only on the condition of our wretchedness.
The more we support each other and the less we suffer, the less we can speak
properly of whether we’ve gotten what we deserve or of whether we ought to
continue in that vein. Morality is about
the peculiar choice to transcend evil by converting it into good. Once the
conversion is complete, there’s no longer any meaning of whether the result ought to be so, since it then simply is or has been made so. That is, there’s no longer any horror to banish. This is
why heaven is as terrifying as hell, since eternity in either case is inhuman. What’s human is the creativity that
requires time, inner emptiness, and alienation to bring to fruition a project
that transcends some commonplace, despicable reality.

When we suffer by identifying with someone else’s misery, we
act anti-naturally. Although we could
despise that victim for being a plaything of nature, fated to die like anyone
else for no satisfying reason, we find we can elevate the circumstances by acting
heroically to blot out the absurdity that’s finally responsible. We rescue the
victim from some misfortune, because we imagine we all have special worth as
autonomous, spiritual beings. Metaphysically, we’re not supernatural, but when based
on the enlightened horror caused by knowledge of what we all are, empathy and
compassion are nevertheless anomalous. We make ourselves godlike when we oppose
chaos and mindlessness, like the biblical god who supposedly hovered over the
face of the deep before creating the universe. We’re godlike also when we struggle
to bring into being a world that subsists only in our imagination and in the
fictions that express our creative vision. Morality
is the wonder of a heroic revolt against a repugnant natural order, when the
tide of pointless misery is temporarily turned back and we erect lighthouses of
virtue with our selfless deeds.

7 comments:

I've read your rants for years Ben, and I find great solace from them. I wanted to ask if you subscribe to a specific political ideology. I doubt you do, because of your cynicism about humans generally (and I share your misgivings), but I just thought it would be interesting to see where your political sympathies lie. I know you despise capitalism for it's cosmic cliches. Where do you stand on the alternatives? Apologies if you've answered this question many times before.

Thanks for reading, Anon. I've criticized both liberalism and conservatism on this blog. I'm liberal on some issues and conservative on others. What's sacred to me is the potential for personal autonomy which leads to enlightenment and to real transcendence (to anti-natural, "satanic" creation of artificial worlds, to the slaying of the dragon of nature). This is a quasi-Gnostic starting point, so I value individual choice as long as it's philosophically informed.

So on social issues like abortion or gay rights, I respect the right to choose. However, the proof that these personal choices are made in an enlightened and thus respectable way is that the individual should be humbled by the existential stakes rather than childishly proud of her subversion of nature, as in liberal identity politics. I'm opposed to the political correctness of postmodern liberalism, and to the scientism implicit in classic liberalism (to the view that reason can tell us how we should live).

I side with conservatives on their pessimism about human nature, their valuing of honour, and the aesthetic (disgust) basis of their morality. But of course I reject the postmodern condition of current American and European conservatism as a disgraceful sideshow and smokescreen for their plutocratic deep states.

I could go on and on, but the political view I'm trying to work out transcends the liberalism/conservatism dichotomy. I try to reduce these divisions to the animal dynamics. Thus, I prefer to talk about ethological classes of alphas, betas, and omegas, and of power relationships between the inevitably-corrupt, psychopathic deities who tend to rule our dominance hierarchies; the flocks of spiritually-unaware beta sheep who follow the psychotic gods and lead the megamachines to ruin; and the alienated outsiders who are enlightened but impotent.

If you'd like a more specific answer, perhaps you could raise a particular political or economic issue, and I could ask my daemon what I should say about it. ;)

If we confine ourselves to the root meaning of the conservative/liberal divide, the conservative would be skeptical of social change and so would cling to tradition for security, whereas the liberal would be optimistic and even iconoclastic, welcoming progress in the name of establishing personal liberties.

This distinction is quaint in the contemporary political context. In any case, descriptively I'd say that conservatism in that sense is a smokescreen, since the traditions themselves are ideologies in something like the Marxist respect, except that the basic structures the dogmas rationalize aren't just economic but biological (class divisions between haves and have-nots). Even the most liberal, progressive, supposedly radical societies such as Soviet Russia, communist China, or democratic US devolve into oligarchies with class divisions that function like those between alphas, betas, and omegas throughout the animal kingdom. Kings, dictators or plutocrats emerge because power must be centralized for the sake of managing any sufficiently large social group. This is true in politics, business, and even the arts (e.g. a director on a movie set).

It's not as if antisocial chaos would be a return to a Hobbesian state of nature, since our animality is preserved even in our most complex civilizations. That's my point: a culture begins as an anti-natural attempt at transcending the mammalian life cycle, but we lose our nerve, become corrupted, forget our guiding ideals (as Spengler said), and so we let our animal instincts take over. For example, in the US the beta class (what Thomas Frank calls the class of neoliberal professionals) becomes preoccupied with entertainment and so unconsciously welcomes the Trump regime rather than voting en masse for Hillary Clinton. Politics is a game for the average Western consumer, since her mindset is shaped by the postindustrial environment (e.g. by the internet and communications technologies which lower attention spans and intellectual standards so that we lose interest even in the difference between fact and fiction).

Prescriptively, I see advantages and disadvantages to both the state of nature (naked or covert dominance hierarchies, disguised as transcendent, artificial social orders) and to genuinely radical societies. I see no reason to be optimistic about our chance of sustaining a non-mammalian (i.e. progressive) way of life, unless we turn ourselves into posthumans at the biological level.

The fundamental question is whether society should be hierarchical or devoid of class divisions. The liberal says that although some social differences may be natural (innate), we should seek to give everyone equal opportunities. The conservative (who is a naturalist, not a religious lunatic, regardless of the rhetoric or lack of self-awareness) says that going against nature in that respect prevents the rise of individual greatness. This was Nietzsche's view of the "order of rank."

Unfortunately, the greatness in question is often short-lived. Billionaires or dictators who climb to the top of a "free" society that allows hierarchies to emerge tend to become mentally subhuman as their power status corrupts their character. Trump is currently the most glaring example, since his mind is childlike rather than impressive or befitting his godlike lifestyle. Philanthropists can leave behind great organizations, but the leaders are often lucky and awarded with the success of their underlings.

So the next question is how a hierarchy should be structured: who should be at the top? It doesn't seem to matter, since the leader tends to be corrupted by the access to centralized power. The differences are cosmetic (e.g. the difference between the George W. Bush and Obama regimes).

Hi Ben, same Anon here. Thanks for the response. I would just like to ask one more question: would you define yourself as a misanthrope? Or is that too reductionist a term? I find myself torn on this issue.

I think the question of misanthropy is about character and mood, not principles, and so misanthropy would come and go as a person's feelings change. As a social outsider in several ways, I am indeed appalled at what most people do.

An outsider's negative feelings could be attributed to bitterness for having been marginalized, or to the objectivity of someone who doesn't have to protect conventions, because he's not part of the group. I suspect such negative feelings are typically a mix of both bitterness and horror/angst. When we see how things are, without the benefit of feeling at home in a culture, because we're alienated for one reason or another, we're not likely to admire what we observe, especially when the world generally is fundamentally absurd.

There are always reasons to be disgusted by any human phenomenon. The only question is whether an outsider's capacity for disgust is bottomless. Presumably, it can't be, so the horror that's appropriate when contemplating, say, political, religious, or economic states of affairs must come and go, as the outsider tires of being in a foul mood and resorts to comedy or to some neutral pastime to keep his spirits up.

In general, do I loathe people? No, because my capacity for contempt is limited. However, I suspect that if you look closely enough, you'll find that everyone is so vile that if your stomach for disgust were infinitely large, you would always find yourself repulsed by what people are and do.

Still, there's more to people than our cliches and animality. There's also our godlike autonomy and creative power. So I think an existentially authentic witness of social practices should fluctuate between feeling disgust and awe.

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About the Author

In this blog you'll find my philosophical rants within the undead god. What on earth is the "undead god," you ask, and why do I rant within it? Read on and find out or just look at how the planet and all of nature mindlessly evolve, setting the stage for our existential predicament. In the big picture, who I am doesn't matter at all and when I write here I write mostly with the big picture in mind. But if you're curious about some of my interests, see my blogger profile.